Innovation Showcase 2022 Pitcher Profiles: Traceably

At the Canberra Innovation Network, we couldn’t be any more proud of this community of entrepreneurs. For their achievements. For their ingenuity. For the way they’ve turned challenges into opportunities and absolutely thrived. The Innovation Showcase is our way to celebrate the hardworking innovation and startup community in Canberra, highlighting those achievements and inspiring even bigger goals for the new year.

It’s a fun and interactive afternoon, encouraging the community to come together, share stories and get energised for the next year ahead.

At this year’s Innovation Showcase Canberra startups will go head-to-head in a live shark-tank style pitching competition judged live by YOU. You’ll have the opportunity to meet new people, learn about the exciting things that came out of 2022 and get a glimpse into what’s in store!

We interviewed the innovators that will be headlining the showcase this year and discussed the meaning of innovation, the future and the event!

Introducing Scott Obara from Traceably. 

What are you pitching at the Innovation Showcase?

Traceably is a customer experience design platform. It is a web-based tool that helps digital product and service delivery organisations design, evaluate and collaborate around a shared view of their optimal customer experience.

If the sky is the limit, what is your ultimate goal?

We want to improve the quality of digital product design and service delivery globally, by providing product and service teams with the tools they need to be more human-centred.

For more than 20 years, Agile has been the leading methodology used to build products and services; but Agile is fundamentally based on a list of work to be done. We believe that to deliver great customer outcomes you need to focus first on the customer’s needs and experience, and second on what to build. By shifting the source of truth from the task list to the customer experience, we believe we can shift the global market to a more effective approach for how they more effectively design and deliver great products and services.

What has been the high of the year for you?

In less than 12 months we’ve gone from a sole founder with an idea to a team of 5 with a validated proof of concept and committed future customers. But more than the progress made, it has been a year of learning. Being an entrepreneur is a world apart from being a working professional. Completing CBRIN’s Idea to Impact program gave us a great start in our learning journey, but it has been all the challenges along the way that have made the biggest difference. From writing our first pitch, getting our first rejection and all the learning and refinements that have followed, we have learned a tremendous amount about not just being an entrepreneur, but about our own product, about ourselves and about what it is really required to be successful on the journey we are embarking upon.

Clever, Connected & Creative. Which of these words do you most identify with and why?

Connected. The initial idea for Traceably came out of the challenge of how to maintain traceability between customer pain points and opportunities, business objectives, policy requirements, research insights, solution scope and more across large and complex programs of work. If one of these items changes or if we learn something new, how do we know how all of the connected items are impacted? And while our initial inception for Traceably came out of very large and complex projects, we realised the same simple solution could be used for smaller teams as well, to keep them more focused on their customer needs and better connect their solutions with the opportunities that will deliver the greatest value.

What does innovation mean to you?

Innovation is an improvement, even if small, resulting in some type of meaningful outcome or outcomes. It is about the meaningful difference we can make in helping software and service delivery organisations improve the quality, efficacy and overall impact their solutions provide to their customers. Innovation may require hard work, careful observation and many iterations to achieve, but we are nonetheless excited to work to achieve our vision of helping organisations to deliver more human-centred products and services.